Category Archives: General

In response to UKIP gloating on facebook..

2015_04_22_21_26_35_March_Cambridgeshire_Free_Discussion

So, this popped up via my town’s facebook group. I couldn’t resist responding. If you’re curious, here’s the wikipedia page on the Indian mars probe.

My response to this, and the assorted “Yeah!”, “We should give them nothing” etc, I responded as follows;

Do you understand what an amazing achievement that was? The normal cost of any western probe to Mars? Hell, I’d gladly pay more tax I can’t afford to for that stunning gem.
It was, and still is absolutely incredible they did it for so little, and with
so little. It’s giving them a reason to strive, to push for something different, for knowledge and understanding and plain old new technology. You know, just that thing humanity must get more of quickly, or watch our world burn from a fire of our own making. We fail, we get to watch our grandchildren or our great grandchildren die. All of them.

I probably shouldn’t have, and hyperbole just a bit on the All Die prediction, but eh, we do nothing about oil running out & climate change, we’re probably all screwed. We’re still probably all screwed anyway, but..

I wonder if this has anything to do with the slow-motion civilization collapse depicted in my current read, Ready Player One?

 

[UPDATED]Useful Firefox addons

2009 vs 2013 Useful Firefox [Browser] Addons

Originally I wasn’t really into add ins then i got into trying loads of add ins and eventuallyi have whittled it back to the few firm favourites/favorites for the americans.
[i was going to del fav bit but then I noticed that my firefox dictionary is still set to US because of it (which is what happened back in 2009 too haha)

ubiquity beta addon for firefox – run, send email, new calendar event, update twitter.
have not tried this yet. Read about it here:
http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/26/mozilla-labs-ubiquity-is-a-firefox-killer-application/
or at mozzy labs: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
[2014 Ubiquity has died, but you can still install the addon (download using the bitbucket link)]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mozilla-labs-ubiquity/

Favourites/remember this website

Tag sifter

Taboo – one click remember this, timeline

Readitlaterlist.com Now Getpocket.com – my cuurent fav  [2014: Still using it today]

Foxmarks

Tabs

Duplicate tab

Tab kit [Plus]- organizer of tabs

[2014 I haven’t used this in a while]

[New for 2013: Firefox: TooManyTabs                                            https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toomanytabs-saves-your-memory]

Testing this one right now!

[2014 Tab Manager]

Awesome enables Tabs of Tabs (another tab bar above so you can group tabs into projects, subjects etc)
however not available for latest firefox and the other versions are buggy/not working. 🙁

[New for 2014: Chrome: OneTab                           http://www.one-tab.com/ ]                           

There really is one tab to rule them all!Fold all open tabs down to one and free all that memory. Edit what’s ‘open’, leave it just as a single tab, or reopen (one by one or all).

I NEED to test this one when I switch back to Chrome!

Session Manager – protector and saver of tabs! [2014: integrated session managers are pretty comprehensive now!]

 

Download Them All

[2014:Still very useful last time I used it a few years ago, but internet speeds have increased monumentally since 2009, so much so that download managers are not needed for that anymore. It’s still a brilliant tool for downloading all images from a page for example]

Cook Me.

This is on my list of things to cook. Soon. Posting it here so I have *no* excuse. Instructions from a friend:

 
Visi: you should make the roast squash!
Visi: chop them in half, scrap out the seeds, score it with a grid, rub butter in, coat in salt and pepper and roast
Visi: put a lil bit of curry powder on near the end
Kirrus: temperature?
Visi: 180 I guess
Visi: whatever temperature you want!
Visi: takes a while but when you can shove a fork through it it’s done
Visi: *easily

Quote of the Day

But in truth it had not exactly been gold, or even the promise of gold, but more like the fantasy of gold, the fairy dream that the gold is there, at the end of the rainbow, and will continue to be there for ever provided, naturally, that you don’t go and look.

This is known as Finance.

– Terry Pratchett

The wind is not your friend

Cycling home tonight, I had just left work’s place, onto a stretch  of road with no streetlights. Picture the scene, it’s just stopped bucketing it down with rain, now spitting. I’m in wet-weather gear, and it’s dark. Quite dark. My backpack has a reflective cover, and I’ve a reflectctive jacket, with a particually annoying LED flashing backlight. (I’m paranoid – shortly will have red LED flashing in my helmet.)

Got out safely, clipped my feet in fine (I now have special shoes that clip onto my pedals), accelerating towards my average 15-17mph on that particular bit of road, the wind decided to push me, hard, towards the edge of the road. A very small shallow there, with a grassy bank. Wheels in the culvert, uncontrollable de-acceleration, equals me flat across the A road, with one car passing me and another just behind it.

Promtly to the sound of car-horns telling me just how close I’d come to getting run over, I dragged myself off the road *sharpish*, and dragged my bike off as quick as I could after I was off. I’ve a couple of very minor abrasions on my ankles. Lucky. Very lucky.

Note to self. When it’s wet and windy, piss drivers off by sticking a meter off from the side. It’s far better than getting run over.

Quick, Easy, Nice way to eat a spare chicken breast

A forum-friend provided this recipe, when I asked for suggestions for a spare chicken breast (other one went into curry.) Very yummy indeed, thanks!

Season chicken breast with salt, pepper and your favourite spice blend.

Bake or grill it. (About 30-45 minutes at 175-200 degrees C)

Once cooked let it rest and start to cool, whilst you prepare the bits to go with it.

Smear mayonnaise and mustard on two slices of bread. Slice the chicken thinly into strips. Then add lettuce leaves to the bread, the sliced up warm chicken, and top with tomato slices.

I mixed the order, adding the chicken and then the lettuce, but it still tasted nice:

Yummy for my Tummy

Sorry about the rubbish photo. Taken on my phone.



Charity shop thievery

I know that someone stole from the charity shop today. Found the remnants of a plastic tag broken by teeth on the floor in the changing room. Thought there was someone doing something suspicious in there earlier, but got distracted by people paying.

Not the first time either, we had a set of known thieves three weeks ago, think they probably suceeded, someone found a destroyed tag outside the shop.

I wonder, do they steal from need, from dependence on stealing, or for the excitement, the thrill of the crime?
Having never stolen anything physical, to knowledge, I don’t know.

Guess this will be one area of curiosity never sated. I just have to keep an eye out for them.

Photo below, Gerald the Giraffe enjoying a glass of coke, having just been rescued from the kidnapping admin team at one of our offices 😉

Receipts

Working at a charity shop, I’ve been on the till of late. It still surprises me how many people don’t want their receipts. You know, of course, that they can’t get a refund without one.

I get not taking one for plain bric a brac, not much to go wrong, but shoes? CDs? I keep thinking, people, almost everything in here is second hand. Mad world.

I hate book study.

I really hate studying from a book. My learning style is much more practial hands on. My mind just does not want to read and make notes on this boring technical book, and I can’t keep myself from getting side tracked.

Case in point, Page 235 of my LPCI 1 text book (awful by the way, don’t get LPIC-1 in depth by Michael Jang, its useless, honestly), I decide to browse through my photo archive after I pulled that shot out yesterday. And this is what I came up with:

sunset photo, taken 20th april 2007 in Wales, UK.

Click to see full size image

Right, mind. Back to shell scripting. (While loops.)